Classic WTF: The Shadow over ShipPoint

And thus does the call of Modthulu stifle even the merest whimpers of the frist post. Held by an unseen, unspeakable horror, the post may never again see the calming rays of daylight, cursed to live its days hidden behind a prison of diagonal bars.

Never have I felt so compelled to comment on someone's style of writing. I am no creative writer nor I do not possess the formal training or experience in the subject to produce a proper dissection of this article. I can, however, offer my uneducated opinion.

While reading through this piece, I was heavily reminded of a mandatory class that I had taken from my early years as an engineering student. Although I have forgotten most of what was taught, one of the major principles that stays with me to this day was presenting your ideas in a simple manner. If I can say what I want to say in a few lines using simple words, that is more preferable than churning out a convoluted paragraph with complex substitutions for simple words and unnecessarily confusing sentences for simple ones .

Granted, what I have said applies more to technical/academic writing and that part of creative writing is presenting information in an appealing and exciting way, I still feel that the core idea of presenting your story in a simple way and not creating unnecessary barriers for readers is relevant.

If you were to point out that some readers would feel a sense of accomplishment and pride from untangling/reading this story, I would say fair point. However, like a lot of things in life, a balance must be struck. You, as a creative writer, are given the freedom to play with the words as you like, to showcase your control over the English language and to create a piece that shows us the extent of your expertise.

I just feel that in this case, it was taken too far and what came out was an article that most people got tired of "parsing" and subsequently, left midway. As a disclaimer, I will say that I speak for myself here but I wouldn't be very surprised if most share the same opinion.

I saw them in a limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare! That interminable list of poorly-implemented features, its shapeless mass extending blasphemous profusions in all directions throughout the code. It seemed to surge and breathe even as I watched...

Come on man, cut this out. This piece would have been a thousand times more readable without this unnecessary, pretentious language.

This might be news to many, but not every time the word ‘I’ is used the speakers are actually referring to themselves. This concept is called first-person narrative and is used in fiction or for effect. To give an arbitrary example: it could be a stilistic choice for someone trying to parody a specific style of period writing.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Shocking Truths, which will cover Santa Claus and the easter bunny.

If you've never heard of H P Lovecraft, or if you have no idea why his work has such a cult following ... then you might want to skip this. It's an excellent homage in terms of both style and content. A failure to recognize this does nothing more than demonstrate your ignorance. On the other hand, sure, if all you want to do is bleat on the Internet about how limited your literary knowledge is, then I'm not going to stop you. Perhaps you'd be happier on 4chan or some other godforsaken black hole?

Alternatively, a failure to recognise that this is supposedly an hommage/pastiche to Lovecraft can be considered as evidence that the reader/failure in question has better things to do than to read second-hand Lovecraft now, and by the same token had better things to do than read Lovecraft in the first place. (It's an excessively flabby pastiche, btw. Where's the Cthulhu?)

There are probably writers who can pull that sort of thing off, but apparently the OP is not one of them. I can just about manage a whole book-full of the original style, but I could barely manage three paragraphs of this.

Alternatively, a failure to recognise that this is supposedly an hommage/pastiche to Lovecraft can be considered as evidence that the reader/failure in question has better things to do than to read second-hand Lovecraft now, and by the same token had better things to do than read Lovecraft in the first place. (It's an excessively flabby pastiche, btw. Where's the Cthulhu?)

There are probably writers who can pull that sort of thing off, but apparently the OP is not one of them. I can just about manage a whole book-full of the original style, but I could barely manage three paragraphs of this.

This. As dumb as most of the internet's "articles" are, we should appreciate some actual writing now and then.

For the critics:

Dan get job at company called ShipPoint. Jimmy and Jack lie about job to trick Dan. Jimmy and Jack make big mess. Marsh in charge. Nobody ever see. Very scary ghost! Walter is old man. Walter hired for experience. Then Walter resigned. His friend Arthur stay. Then Arthur laid off. Dan thinks he can still win. He doesn't. Marsh call Dan to office and lay Dan off too. Rob go back to Mypos. The end.

Google the phrase used in the second-to-last paragraph, with cthulu in place of codethulu: lä-R'lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

This was a fantastic adaptation, and, at least in my opinion, fit the subject matter pretty well. An unknown, maddening horror, found in documents buried deep in a mysterious building? Literally straight out of Lovecraftian lore.

Sure, the story COULD have been told in a couple paragraphs, but that's not the point of this post. It was a fun, tongue-in-cheek homage to a great horror writer about a particularly trying time in the author's life.

I adore Lovecraft's writing and stories... but they actually make sense in their context. His style builds tension around things that are supposed to be mysterious and paints vistas in your imagination. This does exactly none of that. The writing on this site is never good, but this is just crap.

"(Or in this case the actual shock that anybody would compare this drivel to Conrad.)" The narrative style and the plot does resemble Heart of Darkness to the extent that I could see this as a satire of Conrad using names from Lovecraft, but the writer is no Conrad. And that's no insult - few professional writers would hope to equal Conrad. Conrad is one of the greatest composers of prose in the English language, and it wasn't even his native language!

I think I could also find parallels to this in Dracula, Frankenstein, and some Edgar Allen Poe stories but I wouldn't compare the writer to Poe, Bram Stoker, or even Mary Shelley. As for Lovecraft, I've seldom been able to read more than three paragraphs of his prose, so maybe this is a 'good' satire of Lovecraft...

All in all, assuming the OP has no ambition of writing fiction professionally, it is a valiant effort.

Indeed. There is such a thing as trying too hard. I hope Dan J.'s code isn't as verbose and painful to read as this article. It was a waste of my time to read it, and a huge waste of his life to live it. Whether an 'engineer' or mangler, one either sees the light or doesn't when presented with it; persistence is almost always in vain. Even the pay was crap, so I have no sympathy.

Ironic really when this site very often posts articles clearly inspired by programmers who were probably competent at something in IT but who decided to grasp the nettle and start hammering away with a language or framework they weren't familiar with and hadn't bothered to properly educate themselves in.

They produce a hideous, over-complicated mess of copypasta, cargo cult, inner platform, etc etc as they thrash around adding more where there should be less. Rather like this article, a corpse nailed in the upright position. Somewhere out there, there is a creative writers' equivalent of TDWTF, chock full of stuff like this for them all to collectively bitch about.

We could be in danger if "the current climate of deregulation..." presumably repeals some regs. This implies that the crash of 2008 was caused by deregulation. It was not. It was caused by more than one thing, for sure, but the largest thing would be regulations like the community reinvestment act and others that forced lenders to lend to those who wouldn't otherwise qualify. Yes, the financial sector went hog wild with all this inventory, but bad regulation (not deregulation) was the source cause.
The reason we in the first world have the luxury of sitting on retirement accounts in the first place is because we're not (yet) regulated to the point where business can't operate any longer.
Pointy haired bosses and all, it's business, not government, that creates wealth.

I feel like i need to clarify this, as this was a story I submitted. I did not write it in the Lovecraft style, but had a different story with slightly different names (I lost the original submission though). I guess, since I coined the title as "The Shadow over ShipPoint" when I submitted the article that TDWTF ran with the Lovecraft theme but I think went a bit too far in Lovecraftian prose. Basically the main WTFs were:

One developer (Jack) could overrule three of us (Me, Arthur, Walter) when we had agreed on something as a team. In fact, Jack did this several times, including storming out of a meeting one day because he "had real work to do" and then taking a half day to avoid another team meeting.

Mr. Marsh lying to us about various things, including when we had decided to do things more agile going under everyone directly to Jack and getting him to add features not planned for under the table.

Lying to me about "rebuilding the team" after Arthur and Walter left (Jimmy was long since gone) and promising me that I could be made the manager since I was already doing that role, and then turning around and firing me saying that my "C# skills weren't good enough".

Hiring a developer with really good web design skills, and with no guidance or direction telling him to redesign the main page of the application so it worked better on an iPad (despite none of our customers asking for this), then panicking and throwing him under the bus when the sales floor came in one morning to discover the page had been completely redone without anyone on the sales team being notified. During the design phase, Mr. Marsh flat out said that the sales leadership "doesn't know what they want, senior management knows better".

As a bonus WTF, after I left Mr. Marsh contacted me to ask if I had put a bad review on Glassdoor, claiming that they were going to subpoena Glassdoor to get a list of names of people who wrote bad reviews to sue them, as it breached some agreement that was signed.